Various widescreen options and resolutions. Only 5.5 pounds. Heavenly keyboard and dual pointing devices. Modular optical drive that you can swap out for an extra battery. Comprehensive management suite. Good performance scores.

Cons

No Wireless WAN options.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo ThinkPad R61 now comes in a widescreen format and looks a lot like our Editors' Choice, the ThinkPad T61 Widescreen.

The ugly duckling of Lenovo's ThinkPad line has become a swan. Not long ago, R-Series ThinkPads were regarded as value-oriented, general-purpose machines at best. The R Series was a bulkier, non-widescreen version of the world-class ThinkPad T Series. People usually settled for an R-Series laptop when they couldn't pay T-Series money. But that's all changed with the ThinkPad R61 ($1,768 direct). The new model is more media-friendly than its predecessors. It has a widescreen now and assimilates the elegance of the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen, an Editors' Choice. With all these enhancements, there are now remarkably few differences between the two ThinkPads. Though it still won't be supplanting the Apple MacBook Pro (15-inch) as the Editors' Choice in its category, the R61 is a nice, affordable solution if you're willing to do without WWAN and discrete graphics.

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Until now, the R-Series has stuck with a standard screen. After all, the ThinkPad Z Series anchors Lenovo's widescreen department, and the T-Series went wide soon after the Z-Series launched. The ThinkPad R61 signifies the convergence between the R-Series and the Z-Series (ThinkPad Z61m and ThinkPad Z60t), which Lenovo will begin phasing out at the end of this year. With the R61, you can choose between a 14-inch or a 15.4-inch widescreen. My review unit came with a brightly lit 14-inch screen with 1,440-by-900 resolution. You can bump the resolution down to 1,280-by-800, which doesn't do justice to the screen, or upgrade to both a 15.4-inch screen and a 1,680-by-1,050 resolution to enhance your multimedia experience. Lenovo is still reluctant to add a glossy screen, which, although it would add more contrast and pop to your photos and videos, can also cause substantial glare.

At 5.4 pounds, the R61, even with a widescreen, is over a pound lighter than its earlier version, which weighed 6.5 pounds and came with a standard screen. That suddenly puts it into the same league as the T61 Widescreen. Their dimensions are practically identical. The R61, at 9.4 by 13.2 by 1.4 inches, is about 2mm thicker. And the Lenovo typing experience is still the best. The ThinkPad keyboard is the most responsive in the industry, and you get dual pointing devices with the touchpad and the lovable TrackPoint pointing stick.

Of course, there has to be something that separates these two laptops. The R61 doesn't have options for Wireless WAN, also known as Verizon's and Sprint's EV-DO and Cingular's HSDPA. And you can't slap a Centrino Pro sticker on it, either (only Centrino Duo), as you can with the T61 Widescreen. The reasoning behind this is that the R61 is focused more on mainstream customers, so the extra networking features are going to be a luxury given to hardcore business users, at least for now. That said, Lenovo adds webcam options for the first time in the R-Series. My review unit did not come with one, but you can configure a 1.3-megapixel webcam for an extra $40. You can also upgrade the modular DVD drive to a Blu-ray burner, a hard drive, or an extra battery. As with the T61 Widescreen, you can customize the card slots by picking two of the following: A PC Card slot, an ExpressCard 34/54 slot, a SmartCard reader, or an SD card reader.

The rest of the features are standard, including three USB ports, a FireWire port, and VGA-out. Like all ThinkPads, the R61 comes with Lenovo's feature-rich ThinkVantage suite. One of the new additions is BatteryStretch, a battery enhancement tool. By checking a few boxes, you can disable certain aspects of Windows Vista and XP Pro. You can change the brightness of the display, turn off wireless radios, and mute audio to conserve power. More familiar ThinkVantage utilities include Access Connections (to manage network profiles and connections), Rescue and Recovery (for backing up and restoring files), and Active Protection System (a hard drive accelerometer).

The R61 recently launched along with the T61 Widescreen as Lenovo's first Centrino Duo (aka Santa Rosa) offerings. With the new platform, the R61 benefits from a 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 processor with 800-MHz support. Its SYSmark 2007 Preview overall scores edged out the similarly configured Dell Latitude D630. And because my review unit came with Windows XP Pro, the R61 beat out both the HP Pavilion dv2500t
and the Fujitsu LifeBook A6030, which had Windows Vista Home Premium loaded. On our tests, Windows XP Pro has proven to be a faster operating system than Windows Vista on certain SYSmark 2007 tests, such as its E-learning (Adobe Products) and Video Creation (Adobe and Sony) suites. Windows XP Pro skewed the overall score in favor of the R61.

The R61's Adobe Photoshop scores, helped by the 2GB of RAM, kept the competition at bay. This amount of RAM should be the default minimum, whether you're running Windows XP Pro or Windows Vista. The R61 can be configured with either Intel's integrated GMA X3100 graphics or with discrete graphics using nVidia's Quadro FX. In the interest of maximizing battery life, Lenovo went with integrated graphics as the standard configuration. The 2 hours 48 minutes that the R61 lasted while playing a DVD beat out the T61 Widescreen by about an houralthough the T61 uses discrete graphics (nVidia Quadro NVS 140M) and a higher clocked processor (2.4 GHz), both of which drain the battery rapidly. The R61's 56-Wh battery (6-cell) is average in size. You'll want to spend $20 to upgrade to the seven-cell battery.

The Lenovo ThinkPad R61 has gotten a much needed makeover, and now it can give its media-driven competitors something to think about. It started as a conservative ugly duckling and went on to inherit the various widescreen options from the ThinkPad Z Series and the design grace of the ThinkPad T61 Widescreen.

Lenovo ThinkPad R61

Lenovo ThinkPad R61

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